For multiple reasons, it is hard to change people’s minds. In particular:

Nobody likes to admit — even to themselves — that they were wrong.

Once a decision is made, it can be genuinely costly to change.

Many views — especially political ones — are “tribal”. You believe what you believe because that’s what group membership requires you to believe.

Analyzing things can be difficult and stressful. People like to make up their minds, resolve the uncertainty, and move on.

Yet tremendous resources are devoted to persuasion, meant to change or confirm people’s beliefs as the case may be. That’s the essence of such activities as marketing, religion, education, and political campaigns — not to mention blogging. I.e. — despite the difficulties, persuasion is widely (and of course correctly) believed to be possible. Let’s explore how that works.

Most persuasion and mind-changing, I believe, fits into five overlapping categories, which may be summarized as:

Influencing people’s first impressions of or initial beliefs about a subject.

Persuading somebody to narrow or otherwise change the scope of an ongoing belief.

Influencing somebody’s level of confidence in an ongoing belief.

Influencing the importance somebody ascribes to an ongoing belief.

Actually changing somebody’s mind about something.

The first two are discussed below. The next two are discussed in a companion post. I’m still trying to figure out how the last one works. 🙂 Read more

After a nasty bit of hacking — plus over 5000 spam comments that made it past Akismet — I think we’re back in business. PLEASE tell me if you detect any further problems with this blog. There’s an email address at the Contact link; also, I’m CurtMonash on Twitter and Facebook alike.

This is the second post of a short series about what I think is an underused business model among software entrepreneurs, namely sponsored (i.e. customer-funded) development. Key points of the first post included:

If you have an invention you can’t fund yourself, having your first customer(s) pay for development may be the key to realizing your dreams.

… and to be willing to invest in projects with obviously high risks of failure.

Are sufficiently limited technically to believe that your team is significantly stronger than what they could hire and deploy themselves.

This post covers the nitty-gritty of sponsored-development deal-making.

As per the previous post in this series, suppose you are fortunate enough to identify the right customer for a sponsored-development relationship. Then the deal process is likely* to go something like this:

You start as you would in any other unproven-vendor sales cycle.

You politely turn down the inevitable offer to simply hire you and your team onto their payroll. 🙂

You explain that you have to keep the intellectual property yourself. This is crucial. If they don’t firmly agree, walk away from the sales cycle at that point.

You ascertain whether there’s really a deal to be done. This is harder than it is in other kinds of sales cycle.

You get to the neighborhood of “Yes”.

You politely reject the first offer they make to fund you, because one of terms will be that, if all goes well, they can buy your company at a price in the range of 3-5X what they will be investing. That’s not nearly enough upside for you.

You do a win-win deal.

*Actually, the deal process is likely to fail. Most deal processes do. But if it does succeed, it’s likely to look like what I just outlined.

Two of the bullets above allude to challenges in agreeing on deal terms. The first concerns IP ownership. The structure you should insist on is: Read more

Donald Trump’s favorite musical is said to be Evita, the story of the fascist/populist couple Juan and Eva Peron, who guided Argentina from status as a rich country to being pretty much of a third-world wreck.* Isaac Butler wrote about that back in November, but he missed a key point. More precisely, he missed a key song, whose lyrics I shall copy below. (I think this is one of the rare cases in which printing a song’s entire lyrics is clearly fair use.) Emphasis added.

*In real life, Juan Peron was vastly more influential on his country than his second wife Eva, not least because he lived much longer. But the musical portrays them as more equal partners, giving her great credit for his original ascension to power.

They base their views heavily on the successes of the Tea Party in the Obama years.

As might be inferred from the name they chose — “Indivisible” — they’re focused on protecting-the-threatened kinds of issues, such as religious discrimination, sexual discrimination, or health care for the poor.

They’re focused on Congress — House and Senate — rather than state legislatures.

It’s time for another of my quick primers on the enterprise IT business. This one is about sales. First I’ll run through some generalities; then I’ll link you to some previous posts; after that I’ll close with a collection of practical tips.

This is, to put it mildly, an important subject. In particular, there are only two kinds of enterprise IT CEOs:

Those who need to understand sales because they don’t have anybody else to do it for them.

Those who need to understand sales because they do have people to do it, who need to be managed and helped.

Every enterprise IT CEO needs to be heavily involved in sales.

Of course, a few tips do not a salesperson make. Selling is a complex process, with many steps. Worse, it’s tough for somebody to explain to you what the process is, in part because there’s a kind of recursion involved — a big part of what you do in the sales process is establish what the process is.

And that’s in both senses of “establish”, namely “figure out” and “bring into being”.

Other inherent difficulties in selling include:

Selling involves getting money from people. People don’t like to part with money.

Buying from you often involves a lot more commitment — and foreclosure of other options — than merely writing you a check.

Usually, a sale involves getting agreement from multiple people. These people often have different views, biases, and motivations.

Much of this blog gives advice about how to tell a story. But that’s actually an oversimplification. In fact, you’re almost always in the situation where you want to tell multiple stories at once. The main messages of this post are:

Figure out which stories you are telling (the complete list, if you please).

Make sure that you’re telling each of them well.

Reasons the multiple-stories situation is so common include:

Products are, unavoidably, positioned along many attributes each. If you’re trying to get a prospect or influencer to think well of a product, you may need to address multiple important concerns.

A product release typically introduces multiple new features in a product.

People only pay attention to you sporadically. Thus:

When you’re pitching them about something new, you generally also should reinforce the belief that your product in fact has been great all along, because your historical greatness may not be at the top of their minds.

Similarly, they may need to be reminded — i.e. informed — of your evidence for company momentum.

Customer momentum stories typically include quotes as to why the customers so liked your product. Product feature stories often include customer momentum validation.

The first way to deal with all this is via modularization. In some cases, that’s easy. (E.g. websites can make different points on different pages.) Sometimes it’s harder, but worth doing anyway. E.g., in my recent post on influencer pitches, I said: Read more